‘I’m devastated’: How police botched a DUI investigation after a crash killed a girl’s parents

Benyamin “Benny” Benyamin, at center, and his wife, Zafrit “Sofie” Ruvio Benyamin, died in a car crash in Lauderhill in 2017. The couple had left their daughter, Shiraz, home with a sitter that night. (handout / Courtesy)

A botched investigation by Lauderhill police allowed a drunken driver to avoid a severe sentence in a car crash that killed both of a little girl’s parents, the agency says.

Among the agency’s missteps: It used spray paint on a rainy night to mark the crime scene, and it failed to take the right photographs needed for trial, Deputy Chief Allen Siegel said.

Advertisement

“I’m devastated over this,” Siegel said. "We created an issue and very unfortunately, the person ... got off with her hands slapped.”

Police had wanted to prosecute the driver, Judith Khouri, for DUI manslaughter, which could have led to a prison term if she was convicted, Siegel said. Instead, Khouri, 56, of Pompano Beach, received 30 days in jail on a misdemeanor DUI charge, a sentence that she recently began to serve.

Police said the series of blunders by multiple people at the department led to swift internal changes, including a policy that no crime scene can be considered finished until a supervisor has signed off to make sure the evidence has been correctly gathered.

Evidence “is perishable," police spokesman Lt. Michael Santiago said. "If it’s not [taken] that same night, that evidence gets lost, never to be recovered.” The internal changes will prevent this from happening again,” he said.

Parents’ night out

The Israeli couple had left their then-6-year-old daughter home with a sitter for a night out at a club to celebrate Benny Benyamin’s birthday, according to a family attorney.

They took a cab-hailing service to go out, but to get back home, they took a ride with Khouri in her 1998 Mercedes.

Khouri failed to yield the right of way to a Honda traveling on a green light at 3 a.m. March 26, 2017, police said. As a result, the Honda T-boned the Mercedes at Commercial Boulevard and Northwest 70th Avenue in Lauderhill.

Khouri survived. Her blood alcohol level was .14 almost three hours after the crash. The legal limit in Florida is .08.

Missing evidence

Siegel said prosecutors had no shot of charging Khouri with anything more serious even though police tried to present enough evidence for DUI manslaughter charges. A spokeswoman with the State Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

An accident reconstructionist told prosecutors it was impossible to know where in the intersection the accident occurred or how fast the cars were traveling, “due to the lack of documentation of the crash scene,” according to records released by the State Attorney’s Office.

Valuable evidence was lost the day of the crash and even the days that followed, the expert told authorities, according to memos from the State Attorney’s Office.

Lauderhill police took 78 photos at the crime scene — but none of those included shots of the intersection or the possible area of the cars’ impact. And the shots of the evidence that were taken were captured too close, with no “background characteristics that could be used to assist in identifying their location,” according to the memos.

Advertisement

A diagram completed by police showed some information — but left out “numerous pieces of evidence” that were photographed the night of the crash, according to the memos.

Because of “insufficient documentation of the evidence the night of the crash and the days following the crash," authorities couldn’t say who caused the accident, and different scenarios pointed to either driver.

When Lauderhill police performed distance calculations using surveillance video, it determined the other driver was traveling 71 mph. But an expert for the State Attorney’s Office said those calculations “were done incorrectly” and the Honda that crashed with Khouri was likely traveling closer to 57 mph in those frames.

Errors at the scene

Siegel said Doug Szczepanik, the lead traffic homicide investigator on scene the night of the crash, marked the road with spray paint even though it was raining, instead of using road markers.

Siegel said Szczepanik didn’t look at the aide’s crime-scene photos to approve them, and had he seen them, “I believe he would have identified those deficiencies,” Siegel said. Szczepanik’s supervisor that night hadn’t signed off on the case, either, Siegel said.

But Szczepanik said Thursday that the agency’s account is inaccurate. He said using the orange spray paint at the time was the right decision because it wasn’t raining and the paint could hold for weeks. He said when it rains they use nails to mark the scene — a painstaking process with “90 pieces of evidence.“

He said the agency went to Home Depot only after the fact to buy a nail gun.

Szczepanik said the aide who responded that night should’ve had more training. “When you’ve got a double homicide, I assume the person assigned to me knows what they’re doing,” he said.

He identified other problems with the case: An off-duty police officer and his girlfriend traveling in separate cars were witnesses to the cars spinning after the crash, but they had conflicting versions what color the traffic light was.

There has been no formal investigation completed or underway about what went wrong with police’s internal policies because the key Lauderhill staffers who originally worked the crime scene are no longer with the agency, Siegel said.

Szczepanik, an officer for decades, retired July 31, 2017, according to records. The aide who took the photographs in error also has left the agency, and the lieutenant supervisor that night also is gone. The departures were not related to the Khouri investigation, according to the deputy chief.

Khouri reported to jail May 31, according to court records. The judge ruled she’ll serve her 30-day sentence on consecutive weekends. She will not stay there on weekdays. Khouri also must spend 150 hours speaking to youth groups about the dangers of drinking and driving.

Szczepanik said the department was blaming him for a case gone wrong, because he’s no longer there. “We asked for equipment and they always said we’ll put it into the budget," he said. “It always rained down here. We had a hammer and nails. It’s impossible to do a scene like that.”

Improving policies

Siegel said that, in addition to new rules for supervisors to sign off on crime scenes, “everyone in that chain of command, through the major, all have traffic homicide experience.”

The sergeant now in that unit is a crash reconstruction expert. Now, reviews of the cases — by the entire unit, including the major — are required. In addition, continuing-education courses are now available for the police service aides who take photographs.

Advertisement

“We’ll no longer release that scene until the supervisor has [gone] through that scene and [made] sure everything is done,” Siegel said. “If I have to close that street [for] a day, we’ll do that.”